In co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 298,967, publication No. 2004/0098477 of Reiner Kraft of IBM, published May 20, 2004, it is stated that, despite the development of Internet web search engines and web crawlers for trying to match buyers requests with sellers offers, the prior art had not yet provided a method of communication between buyer and sellers that allows a free marketplace interaction—a need that “has heretofore remained unsatisfied”. The Kraft patent application suggests trying to solve this problem with a decentralized distributed architecture utilizing a peer-to-peer seller network to serve as an active marketplace, with closer to “real-time” price comparisons.
Examples of such prior art matchmaking techniques are contained in, for example, US patent application publication no. 20040135966 of eBay, and in IBM US application publications nos. 20020007337 (Jan. 17, 2002), 20020022967 (Feb. 21, 2002), 20020143660 (Oct. 3, 2002), 20020156686 (Oct. 24, 2002), 20020165815 (Nov. 7, 2002), 20020178108 and 20020178072 (Nov. 28, 2002), 20020188545 (Dec. 12, 2002), 20030028469 (Feb. 6, 2003), 20030110047 (Jun. 12, 2003), and 20040267630 (Dec. 30, 2004)—but none solving the problem of allowing merchants and customers to interact in a free marketplace format, but rather just offering comparison shopping solutions that are, however, quite limited.
Like the above-cited Kraft-IBM application, the present invention is also concerned with how to buy and sell desired products or services in a multiple-buyer multiple-seller marketplace in an inherently fair and optimized manner both for the buyer and for the seller, and also based on the real-time dynamics of marketplace conditions.
More specifically, the present invention addresses the problem of how to buy a product at the lowest possible value at that time as derived by instantaneously making hundreds or thousands of sellers or more, compete amongst themselves in real-time to win the buyer's business, and be ready and available to do so on a twenty four-hour, seven-day/week basis, and, further, independent of geographic boundaries.
Otherwise stated from the seller's perspective, how profitably to sell to a large geographically dispersed customer or buyer base, in an on-line environment growing a large number of competing sellers with ever-changing market dynamics, and without spending huge resources in terms of man-power, infrastructure, and mass advertising.
In an environment of a large number of suppliers of similar goods, indeed, buyers and sellers face different problems. From the buyer's perspective, existing mechanisms do not force the sellers to compete iteratively amongst themselves to win the business. The current mechanisms, both on-line and off-line, are inefficient and their response is either non-instantaneous or provides a quality of information that is stale. From the seller's perspective, furthermore, the existing solutions do not allow sellers to be highly responsive either to the competition or to the customers. They are forced to spend dedicated man-power and associated expenditures for current on-line non-automated, largely non-real-time systems which, indeed, may even neutralize any meaningful derivable benefits.
Such and other limitations in prior attempts to address these issues will now be reviewed.